


White Knuckle It (Til We Land in Heaven)

by lesbianettes



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Brainwashing, Dehumanization, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Drug Withdrawal, Gaslighting, Hurt, Hurt No Comfort, Manipulation, Medical Trauma, Murder, Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Whump, Non-Consensual Drug Use, POV Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Starvation, Stockholm Syndrome, Temporary Character Death, Torture, Trauma, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:01:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26426056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianettes/pseuds/lesbianettes
Summary: Nicolo didn't make it out of Merrick Industries. In fact, he didn't make it out until he was a different person.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nicolo di Genova & Doctor Meta Kozak
Comments: 12
Kudos: 186





	White Knuckle It (Til We Land in Heaven)

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings in the tags, let me know if I missed any. Tags serve as the warnings for the fic and if you neglect to read the tags, you are responsible for your own reactions to the content.

It starts with a question of if their minds are as resilient as the rest of them. They cut into more than just their skin, to see if brain tissue is capable of regeneration in the same way, if they’re left with permanent damage to the soft grey matter and whether their nerves work. It stops hurting once they get past the skull. The nerves inside of the brain are not the same as that in the rest of the body, and are incapable of registering pain or heat or cold. The scalpel causes no sensation. The only way to tell that something has happened is the squishy red pink blob in Kozak’s hand, studying it, before she puts it in a specimen jar and watches him heal. Metal holds his head open. He cries, he thinks, more reflex tears than any choice of his, but before long, it’s over. 

“Remarkable,” as she has said so many times before.

The clamps vanish. His head becomes whole. Exhausted, restrained, he can simply lay there and watch her walk around him like a vulture circling a carcass, except that he is still alive- not for lack of trying on her part or that of her employer’s army. It’s his own fault he’s still here. He came back to finish her off, but by then, those still alive had regrouped. His family was outside, waiting for him, but he never got back. No, they sedated him, dragged him away, brought him who knows where and continued right where they left off. Kozak’s lab coat still says  _ Merrick _ , although everything else here has another name he hasn’t cared to read. It won’t help him. They don’t let him out for anything. When they arrived, his body weak and still, as Kozak attached IVs and monitors, she placed another tube in him, in a place he firmly believes tubes should not be. It carries away any waste his body makes from the liquid nutrition flowing into his veins.

“Remind me,” she says. She’s labelling the little plastic tube containing a part of his brain. “What did they use to call you? Your ‘family?’ I don’t think your lover ever said back in Surrey.”

He does not answer her. 

“I can make you. Or, of course, I could call the search for them back on. They’d be easy to find, out looking for you. Then they can tell me your name, and I can turn all of my curiosities to them, and you won’t have to say a word.”

She carries on with her work, as though it means nothing to her what he chooses. The torture of four innocents is, to this woman, nothing but a game to play, in order to make him obey her. It is the same game that a different doctor, a neurologist, played while he was strapped down inside a loud machine. They showed him photos and watched how his brain responded. Photos of adults disemboweled, photos of children with their faces bruised and gaunt. They want to see how he thinks. How he feels. They showed him security footage of his family inside the labs. Then they showed him parts of his own body, and he threw up in their very expensive machine, and it stopped. Everything is a game. They’re always recording everything he does. 

“Nicky.”

“Short for?”

There is too much blood on him to make for good working conditions. It could taint samples and make it hard to see what she’s doing, so she takes a moment to use an antiseptic wipe to clean the worst of it. At some point, he was bathed properly like a rag doll. Although he was unable to move, someone was there to hold him down and maneuver his heavy limbs while another washed blood and sweat from his skin. It was the sort of care he had expected from Yusuf. Time taken to clip his fingernails and wash behind his ears. So slowly, they made him fresh and new like a babe, and then carried him back to the lab table where they pull samples away. He can handle this, but he doubts the others could. It is not his belief they are weak, but that they are too precious for such a thing.

“Nicolo di Genova,” he tells her. “We did not have last names, then.”

“How long ago?”

He returns to Andy’s favorite lie. “I do not remember.” If he tells her too much, she can put things together about Yusuf, although most can be guessed anyways. “Younger than our leader, older than the traitor.”

Even as angry as he is, he will not give her information on Booker. Like the others, Booker is family, and it is his sad, narrow mouse-like eyes that accompany dreams of the outside world. Right now, his memories are the only things he has left, coupled with a glance of hope that they will find him. They won’t give up on him when they know what must be happening.

“What is your pain tolerance, Nicolo?”

He shrugs as best as the restraints will allow him to; he would consider it to be higher, higher than a normal human being could tolerate. Nile said that Booker had been blown in half, and walked as he healed, even through the pain. No mortal could withstand that. His concept of pain is beyond what she can even begin to imagine, and yet, it is frighteningly low when it comes to the emotional toll of something happening to his family. A simple papercut to Yusuf’s fingertip makes him cry. That is how it has been since the day he laid his sword in the dust and said he wanted to do better. 

She must understand it to be high, for the number of times she has cut into him and killed him since he was taken. It’s impossible to know how long he has been gone, so often plagued by unconsciousness and with no clock in sight to tell him how the hours pass. Really, he keeps track of the socks Kozak wears, when he is able to see, to tell if another day has passed. A conservative estimate says a week, but his less rational self indicates a lifetime of this torture.

The IV in his arm, the one that keeps him from withering away from this lack of substance or that, is swiftly disconnected from the usual clear bag hanging above his head. It feels oddly empty, to not have something flowing into his veins, warm as well. The solution is always as cold as the air in the lab. Of course, she does not do this for a reprieve to such a small annoyance. Instead, a fresh bag of something clear is hooked up, a label written in code he cannot understand, and connected to the port buried under his skin. A deep bruise surrounds it still, unable to heal. At some point, he thinks, the vein blew, and she had to leave him without the sustenance for nearly an hour while he bled into his arm. 

“I’ll keep it at a drip,” she says. She adjusts the clip on the line, allowing the first drops to flow through the IV line, towards his arm. “This is a potassium chloride solution. Are you familiar with its usage, Nicolo?”

At first, the fluid in his body feels like the saline from before, but then it aches. Burns. He instinctively tries to pull away from the sensation, but it’s already inside his body. So little, but it hurts more than anything she’s done, spreading up his arm and into his chest. In an attempt to prove a point, do something other than give her the reaction she must be looking for, he forces his body still and shuts his eyes. Like everything else, this will pass. It is not a permanent pain. 

“Potassium Chloride is used in lethal injections. A small amount could be helpful to a malnourished person. A medium amount may not kill you, but it’ll hurt. And a proper injection is used to induce cardiac arrest. Those who experienced botched executions describe the sensation of their bodies being on fire. Does it feel like you’re on fire, Nicolo?” He won’t even look at her, which makes her sigh and loudly play with his IV. “If it does kill you, you’ll just come back, so that’s not a concern. How would you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?”

Slowly, the pain spreads through his entire body, until he can seemingly feel it in every nerve ending his body has to offer. And despite many pains he has experienced over the course of his life, this one does not become more tolerable the longer he is subjected to it. Rather, it just gets worse. His muscles go involuntarily tight, to the point of another awful ache that comes in a distant second to this. Such an injection has not killed him before- thought he’s died by hanging and on a cross at different points in his time. This, he thinks, will be one of the worst deaths his body has been forced through. There is no relief from the pain. 

“On a scale of one to ten, or I’ll increase the dosage. Number your pain level, please.”

That may be the first time she’s said please to him. He shakes his head back and forth slowly, before the level of it steals control of his muscles. His brain is sending out mayday cries, begging him to get away from the source of the pain, as though it is not already buried as deep in his body as something can be. He thinks he may vomit, although his sensory input has seemingly shut down. He bites through his tongue. And then things go black.

When he next comes to, the same IV is connected to his arm, though a clip on the line prevents it from actually getting to him. Someone has cleaned him up, and he runs his tongue along the back of his teeth to feel that it is there once more. Time has passed. A new smear of blood on his chest, rivulets dried where they once ran, indicates his chest had been cut open in the time he’s missing. He should not have expected less. 

“I think this could be a valuable tool.”

Kozak adjusts the speed of the drip and removes the clip, waiting patiently for it to reenter his body and his panic to set in. It hurts just as much as before he passed, and this time, does not lessen or make his vision dim. She seems to have figured out how to keep it from killing him. A pity. Death is better than being awake for whatever new game has crossed her immoral mind.

“You don’t have to endure this pain. I can close the line, give you morphine. If you prove yourself to be good, maybe even move on from this tool. You just have to answer my questions and do what you’re told, Nicolo. Wouldn’t it be nice not to fight back?”

He stares at her. She smiles. The pain intensifies and curls around his heart and lungs, though they continue to fight anyways. They want to survive this, more than he does, and will not give up on him in spite of fire running through his blood. She holds up a vial clearly labeled morphine and fills a syringe, even taking the time to flick out the air and swab down a space on his opposite arm. Then, she just stands there. Waiting. She wants something first. 

It takes nearly three hours, by the slow count in his head to stay sane, before it becomes too much to bear. No matter what, the pain doesn’t fade or go numb. He can’t process it fast enough, and by the time his immortal body begins to eat the toxin away, there is a fresh dose of it running straight back to his heart to be carried all across his body. The others would be stronger. Andy may be able to endure this for days, Yusuf until it inevitably kills him. He doesn’t think Booker would even need such an incentive. The thought of Nile experiencing this, because he could not swallow his pride, is what finally breaks him down. 

“I would rate this pain at a nine,” he whispers. 

“Good boy.”

The affectionate, mocking coo makes him sick to his stomach, but she clips the line to stop the flow into his body and, a moment later, pushes the morphine into his arm. It makes him warm all over, a sleepy replacement to the fire consuming him, and for the first time in a while, he feels truly calm. The morphine would have been an invaluable resource from the beginning, had it been offered. He can’t help a sigh. Kozak laughs at him and strokes his hair, pushing it off his face and acting as though she is owed this affectionate press against his skin. He supposes he must allow it for the gift of painkillers. 

“Isn’t this so much easier, Nicolo? You don’t need to suffer.”

He hums. It becomes hard to think of anything but the peace offered by the drug. Nothing compares to its relief, not that he can call to his hazy mind at the moment. Vaguely, he thinks of Yusuf. And he clings to that memory, lest it disappear, and holds it to his chest like a safety blanket for as long as the morphine courses through him. Of course it fades quick, but when he looks at her, she has a clipboard of questions ready, and the bottle of morphine with its syringe beside her. 

“I just have a few questions.”

-

In the end, those few questions become too much for him. She wants to know too much about his family, to whom he remains undyingly loyal, and the most he can bring himself to do is stay silent, rather than verbally oppose her. It must have been quite some while. He’s fallen asleep, he is fairly sure, from the morphine during the time she’s been questioning him; her socks have changed twice, and he’s caught her switching his IV back to the nutritional fluid. Since the first dose of morphine, she hasn’t hurt him. She hasn’t needed to. Their samples have been collected for the most part, it seems, and he’s been well-behaved in the face of her questioning and the few things she does take. When she needs to get a fresh sample, she offers him the morphine first, and it doesn’t hurt, or really feel like anything at all, when she slices off his skin and places it on a tray. 

“Nicolo,” she chastises. Her disappointment actually hurts him, he realizes, when he ducks his head away from her cold gaze. “I thought we were past this. I need you to answer me, or I can get the potassium again.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t,” he whines, and doesn’t recognize his voice.

"Yes you can."

She approaches his side and begins to undo the solution currently keeping him alive, deadly serious in her threat. She understands what this will do to him. And that, eventually, he'll give in, whether he wants to or not, because it is a torture his body is simply unable to withstand. He shakes his head and tries to speak, but his throat feels too tight to say a word. Still, Kozak switches him to the familiar poison and allows it into his body. In its absence, it seems to have become so much more painful and overwhelming to him. He can't do it. He might scream, he cannot tell, but she simply watches him suffer. The sensation is that of every molecule in his body being torn apart.

"When did Nile appear?" She asks him again and he turns his face away. "Come on, Nicolo. You've been doing so well. You even told me her name! I just want to know when she joined you, that's all."

But for all the pain in the world, he refuses to give up his family, truly. He can withstand anything so long as it is to keep them safe, a principle that led him to his complacency prior to Kozak’s gift of the morphine. Nothing matters as much as protecting them. Let her kill him, torture him, rip him limb from limb- he will do whatever is asked of him in the name of their safety. 

“You’ll tell me.”

That’s when it truly all begins. She dims the lights and draws her computer screen near to him, so he can see its pale blue glow up close and personal. It’s just her notes at first. German, short-hand. They’ve been scrawled onto it like it’s a touch screen, which it may be for all he knows about modern technology. But she quickly flicks the window away, and it’s replaced with a slideshow, starting on an image of Booker. It’s clear and high definition in a way that suggests to him it was taken recently, voluntarily. Booker stood for it. There’s even a slight smile at the corner of his lips. The anger and vitriol leftover from his betrayal is strong, but still, he must be protected. He is family. As he looks upon this photograph, a fresh wave of the potassium solution enters his body. He convulses with the force of its pain and bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to bleed. 

“They’re not going to help you.”

The screen changes with a click, to an identification photo of Yusuf some thirty years ago. It was for a college of some kind. He’s grinning wide in it, looking at the person on the other side of the camera, a person who does not seem to really exist right now. The Nicky who made him smile for this photograph is gone. Then the next photo is Andy, caught on a security camera mere moments before they were shot to death in Sudan. She has that panicked look on her face in the moments before the realization it was a trap. And then, Nile’s official marines photo. She looks serious but kind, the fatigues fitting her body much looser than in the social media she showed him. His family is here on the computer, but as he watches them, trying to cling to their faces, the chemical in his body seems to be eating him alive.

“You’ve been here for five years, Nicolo,” she says, and that doesn’t sound right. By his count, it’s only been a few months at most, probably two or three if he really thinks about it. It definitely hasn’t been a full year, or even close to it, let alone five- she’s lying. But she also has no reason to lie to him. Throughout it all, she’s been so honest, if occasionally cruel. “Five years, and they haven’t so much as come near this place. They don’t care about you.”

“They love me,” he counters. 

“They didn’t come for you.”

He shakes his head. The image switches to security footage from Merrick, of his own dead body on the floor, Joe off to the side. Booker, Andy and Nile move on, leaving them there without checking if they’re going to be alright. It focuses on him. How still he is, in the ash and smoke of a grenade. It’s hard to recall in this much agony, but he thinks this may have been before Keane shot him. 

“Yusuf wouldn’t abandon me.”

“He did though, Nicolo, he moved on. They all did. ”

As his body fills, burns, he watches photos of them, memories he isn’t a part of. They walk the streets of the red-light district in Amsterdam, smiling and holding each other. Security footage in a bar shows Booker’s hand on some woman’s hip, Andy and Nile hustling at pool with sunglasses on and their shirts tucked in. It hurts. All of it. Yusuf in a shower, at a safehouse in Portugal. His face isn’t visible, but his body is recognizable anywhere, down to the shape of the muscles at his narrow waist. There’s no reason for her to have this photo. The only way she would is if someone gave it to her. Booker, maybe. But the others would have to know, because they have an almost sixth sense to know when they’re being surveilled

“As soon as it was convenient, they got rid of you.” She shuts the screen off and closes the line of pain. “They aren’t coming for you. But I’m still here, and I’m taking care of you. I’m making sure you’re alright.” She gives him his morphine and it all feels better, so quickly he’s dizzy with the rush. Dopamine, he thinks it’s called. Andy studied the brain when psychology first emerged as a field. “You don’t have anyone else, Nicolo. It’s just us against the world. We’re going to do great things together.”

“They love me.”

“No, they don’t.”

She finally breaks the restraints on his body, and he doesn’t move from his limp place on the table. There is nothing for him, and besides that, he is so spaced out on the morphine, he doesn’t know how to coordinate his limbs to really do a thing besides lay there in a stupor. He clings to the memory of water running down Yusuf’s back, the closest approximation to touching him that his mind will concede to allow him. He misses the touch. The closeness. Before the betrayal, Yusuf curled up behind his back and held him close, the both of them against the world. Yusuf wouldn’t just abandon him like this.

He turns his face against the cold steel. So different from Yusuf’s rough, warm palms. Such a sensation is the only thing he has left, and so he burrows deep into the memory in the haze of morphine as Kozak sets him right. She moves him from the table to a small hospital bed, more for convalescence than a surgical space. He’s so weak right now that she can move him by herself; in the past, it took a paralytic and two men to do it. His muscles are small from underuse, his nutrition intravenous, his body under the influence. She has to work at it, but she can put him into the sheets and cuff one hand to the guardrail. 

“This is what’s best for you,” she informs him. She gives him another shot of morphine to keep him compliant while she does something odd; she changes his hospital gown. Typically this is reserved for his occasional washing, or when he becomes too bloody to continue on, but now, she pulls the fabric off him and replaces it with a pair of sweatpants and a soft shirt. The last time he was this clothed was when they were fighting their way out. “They don’t care about you. I do. Together, we’re going to help so many people, Nicolo. I know this is what you really want, isn’t it? You just want to help people.”

“This is not the way.”

“It is.”

He must admit, it’s warmer in this bed, tucked under a pristine white sheet, which suggests that there will be no more samples pulled or excruciating deaths to suffer through. Kozak is moving on, the same way she seems intent he ought to when it comes to his family. There’s no possibility that so long has passed, though he really can’t be certain either way. He has no clock, no calendar. Only her words construct his reality. Such power over him should be terrifying, but he has forgotten much of the outside world in the wake of this lab becoming his life. 

It’s strange, being cared for this way all of a sudden. He loses his concept of time, so caught up in it all, as they go through the routine of the photos. There are new ones each time. He is punished with the potassium chloride when he is permitted to see his family, and then rewarded with morphine and kind words when its over, followed by real food that Kozak feeds to him. It’s light meals at first, for his weak stomach. Toast and fruit. She allows him to have it until he’s stronger, at which point he’s gifted with better meals. Chicken and fish, mostly, all lean and healthy and given to him after his frequent torture sessions so he doesn’t just throw them up. 

Eventually, she lets him walk. 

To stand on his own two feet again is strange, but he remembers the way to do it, as every person must in the wake of such a thing. Kozak does not help him, although she allows him to grab the side of the hospital bed or a tray of medical instruments to steady himself. His body remembers. It knows. And slowly, as he becomes more mobile, more human again, he stops having to stay in the lab. He has a little room, with a small bed and a clean floor, a TV screen set up in front of it so he may lay there as he receives the programming they offer and the pain Kozak has begun to apologize for. 

Most of the images he sees remain the other immortals, though they are interspersed with other things. He sees men, similar to himself and his old lover, kissing at the same time as he is given a high push of the pain. There is an image of a round labrys axe that he learns to be repulsed by. Everything he is shown is something that he instinctively associates with the violent tremors of his body trying to live through the drugs, like Pavlov’s dog, though it is more aptly Kozak’s dog now. And, often, when she comes to administer his painkillers, his monitor shows him the life he has become accustomed to. There are pictures of her, and other scientists and lab assistance he has seen in passing. Medical tools and hospital rooms are shown, and he is taught what is right and wrong all over again.

That’s when they put a weapon in his hand for the first time since it all started, and he feels more in control than he has in the entirety of his shallow memories. It’s not one he’s held in recent memory; not a gun, nor his favored longsword, but a simple clip point blade which fits perfectly in the palm of his hand. They let him hold it while they show him pictures of the people he once knew. Eventually, they let him use it at this time as well. He sees their faces as he slashes away at ballistic gel and dummies, and on occasion, Kozak will place their likenesses on said practice bodies. He grows used to it. They are the enemy which he fights against. And more and more often, he is given orders on what to do to the dummies. Kill. Incapacitate. Bring back to Kozak. She will tell him, and he listens, and then she rewards him with food or morphine or, on occasion, the comfort of an embrace to his touch starved skin. There is still no telling what amount of time has passed, but he stops caring about it entirely. What are days to an immortal, hours to a creature with no mind of its own?

“You’ve done so well, Nicolo,” she tells him over dinner one night. It is the first in all this time he has been allowed to eat with her, across from her at a wooden table with proper cutlery laid out and wine poured by her steady hands. He calls her Doctor mostly, the stiffness of her last name gone, but still not permitted to know or speak her first name in the way she so easily does his. “Think of all the people you’ve helped by agreeing to this. You’ve done so well for this lab, for me. I’m proud of all the progress you’ve made.”

He ducks his head in thanks. Mostly, he does not speak anymore. It’s easier that way, to avoid saying something wrong and being treated to another round of painful correction. If he’s silent, obedient, well behaved, she’s kind and liberal with her usage of painkillers, something for which he is infinitely thankful. It’s still a game. He has simply learned how to play, that is all. 

When he is allowed to fully leave the laboratory, and feel the sun on his face as he walks beside her, it occurs to him that things hurt much less this way. He was angry when he came to her lab, pained in the wake of betrayal and loss, and she took all of it away. The only unpleasantry he experiences now is caused by his own decisions, and he is aware of what protects him from it and where to seek out relief administered into the crook of his arm. Truly, this is what’s best. 

-

He makes breakfast in the mornings now. Two portions, set on matching plates with silverware delicately placed beside them, must be prepared before she comes down for the first meal of the day. Carefully, he pours her orange juice and coffee with two creams. And, as they eat, she tells him the plans for the day, alongside whatever praise or degradation she has for the events of that which came before. This is usually the same. He’s become well-behaved, and their days typically involve her doing research while he maintains the home and/or the lab for her. Sometimes, he must give samples. He doesn’t mind. The morphine and her calming words keep it from being an issue, and he’s often allowed to know exactly what an item is for, what she’s testing. He has the beautiful opportunity to watch a recording of his own body regenerating- she filmed it after she took a piece of one of his kidneys, and once he healed, showed him how it pushed out and reformed, and then his skin slowly knit back together. It’s fascinating. At some point he shares her fascination, and will offer himself up of his own volition for proper study.

“We’re going home early,” she announces one afternoon. He has been carefully putting label stickers on empty vials for her latest test run of deadly diseases, curious what his blood will be able to fight off, but pauses at her words. If anything, she enjoys staying late to make the most of their hours of study, and he does not think he’s ever heard her so worried as she is now. “Finish that up quickly.”

He hurries along. Typically, he takes his time in those tasks which she allows him, ensuring it’s done right, but if she prefers fast, he can allow for some of the stickers to sit at a slight angle as opposed to perfectly straight. The flaw makes him itch instinctively. Phantom pain spreads up from the vein in his arm where IVs used to sit, but he calms himself with the knowledge that this is what she wants of him. Be fast. Get it done. Then they’re leaving. He doesn’t ask her what’s going on, or where they’re going, but the moment the labels are done, she grabs his arm in a cold grip. 

It’s not necessary. He knows better than to leave.

Still, she drags him along, and he fast-walks after her, conscious of his blade tucked away in his pocket. He’ll defend them if it comes to it. This is his life now, his home, the only source of real love that he is familiar with, and he refuses to simply allow separation because someone doesn’t like the incredible work she’s been doing. He’s been trained to protect her. He’ll do it. When he gets his weapon, she flinches, but doesn’t take it away from him. They hurry some more to the percussion of gunshots. 

“They came for me?” he asks.

“They came to take you away and hurt you.”

His resolve grows stronger. No one will hurt him, or the doctor, ever again. He will die at her feet as he has lived, and come back to do it all over again in the name of every gift she has deigned to give him. Nothing is as important to him as her. Whatever intruders are here reach them before they make it to an exit, and he shoves her against a wall, shielding her with his immortal body from whatever wrath is about to rain down upon them. 

“Nicky!”

He pretends not to hear it. Instead, he focuses on keeping his breathing deep and even. Hers is fast. She’s afraid. She doesn’t have to be, when he can protect her, and it’s a different kind of frightening to know that she has no easily accessible solution to this problem. For the past few years, she has always known what to do and how to take care of him. Everything is up to her. He falls back onto his training as a last resort, and turns to have her pressed between his back and the wall, knife outward defensively. 

It’s them. 

They’ve hurt him.

He can’t throw the knife like he’s learned, because then he’d have nothing to defend himself with, so he simply waits for them to get close, try something that will force his defenses. He’s itching for the chance to avenge all the hurt they put him through, so long as they come closer. Just a little closer. He feels wild, almost feral facing their defiant eyes in person. 

“Nicky.” One of them comes closer. Sebastien, if he recalls properly, steps forward with his hands out and his movements slow, acting like this is some sort of staged moment on the silver screen, waiting. “Nicky, it’s okay. C’mon, let’s get you home.” His shoes squeak on the floor in his movement. Just a little closer. “We’re here now. Look at me.”

Sebastien comes within reach, and so he moves faster than he’s been taught. In a moment, the blood spray soaks through his clothes, coats his hand. It’s followed by Sebastien’s knees hitting the floor. Wildly, he grabs at his cut throat, an instinct more than a need to survive, but he’s bleeding out before his body has the chance to try healing. The others simply stare at his body in wait. 

“Andy?”

It’s Yusuf who speaks. He stays placed in front of the others, however, as they wait for Sebastien to come back to life, gasping like a fish, choking on his own blood again before he fully heals. Serves him right. But as he scrambles back to the rest, Yusuf meets Nicky’s eyes. He does not talk to him. Instead, he speaks to Andromache again. 

“Let me be the one to do this, boss.”

“If you can,” she says back.

The two size each other up for a long while, before Yusuf steps forward. Having learned from Sebastien, he does not come too close, within arms length, staying just far enough away that fighting him would require leaving her defenseless. It’s an impossible problem.

“I’m so sorry, my heart,” Yusuf says softly, and raises his weapon. It’s an assault weapon, one prepped for a quick death. He does not fear it, when he will soon return, and simply stares Yusuf down as he cocks the weapon. “Know that I would not do this if I had a choice.”

“This is not the first time you killed me in cold blood.”

Yusuf whispers something, perhaps a prayer for the tone in his voice, and then the gun pops in his arms. There is a sickening awareness of the bullet penetrating his flesh before things go dark; he has healed quicker since he got here, he thinks, a byproduct of the body recovering faster after each hurt. His skin is smooth once more by the time the metal lodges itself in his heart, and he coughs as it tears through muscle. The world darkens slowly. At least when he killed Sebastien, he had the mercy to make it a fast death.

By the time he falls to the floor, Yusuf’s arms are holding him. He tries to fight back, so used to the restraint being associated with their vicious attacks on him, but his body is too weak in its moments before death. In moments, he will come back. But in the instant he has, he looks to her for reassurance. Her body is mostly blocked by Andromache, now. He spits up his blood on Yusuf as a last fuck you before his heart is too damaged to continue to beat. Yusuf merely holds him closer. 

In under a minute, he comes back. His arms are tightly zip-tied, at the wrists and elbows, his ankles as well. It takes a bit longer to recognize what’s actually happening. Someone is carrying him- Yusuf, he realizes- away from the bloody floors, and he throws himself to the side to try and fall. At least then he has a chance. To run, get a weapon, find her. But the second he tries, Yusuf clings to him tighter and says something that has Nile taking hold of his legs. Between the two of them, he can’t escape. That isn’t for lack of trying. But no matter how hard he thrashes, how desperately he tries to hit Yusuf in the face, they keep hold of him. Andromache leads the way. Sebastien walks behind them. 

“Let me go!” he screams.

“Nicky, amore mio, it’s alright. It’s okay. We’re taking you home.”

He screams again, louder, to the point that Yusuf flinches and nearly drops him. Nile does not do the same. He can’t leave here, the safety of the labs and his room and all that still must be learned of his body. Wherever they take him, he knows for certain they won’t be giving him his morphine, as the doctor often does whenever he so much as turns his pleading eyes on her nowadays. 

“I will kill all of you! Let go of me! Filthy, horrible traitors! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

Andromache holds up a fist and they stop. She turns around with a mournful look and places her pistol between his eyes. He snarls. Undeterred, she shoots him, and he dies instantly. 

-

Andromache and Yusuf trade off killing him until they reach a safe house he has a vague memory of, at which point he experiences his most recent death at their hands. Waking up from that one finds all his zip ties cut, in favor of a single cuff on one wrist holding him to a headboard. There’s food for him on the bedside table in reach of his other arm. A plastic water bottle, uncapped and chilled enough for condensation to sit on the side, and a cardboard container containing a burger. Nothing he could use for a weapon. On principle, he leaves both alone, and waits the three minutes it takes for someone to join him. Of course, it is Yusuf. He sits at the edge of the bed and watches, unperturbed, as he repeatedly kicks him in the side. 

“Are you almost done?” he asks eventually.

“I won’t stop until you release me.”

Yusuf does not respond to the continued assault, so eventually, it isn’t worth the energy. He will find another way out. His clothes were changed after the death, he notes, to something clean and warm with a naggingly familiar cologne across the collar. They watch each other for a long moment before Yusuf speaks again. 

“You called us traitors. Why?”

He scoffs and looks away. They know what they did. That’s why they came back for him, to make fun of the way he trusted them to come for him, but they never did. It’s been years. To make a point, he kicks him again, hitting the fragile space between his ribs. Yusuf curses and twists away, but he doesn’t get off the bed. 

“What is it you think we did?”

“It’s what you did not do,” he admits. “I learned to love my home, but it took five years to start. In all that time, none of you came for me.”

Yusuf gives him a strange look. “Do you remember  _ when _ we were first taken to Merrick? When Nile came to us?”

“Fall, 2019.”

“Exactly. My heart, it is winter of 2020. It’s barely been a year. And we never,  _ never _ stopped looking for you. We did everything we could. But they hid you, and it was hard, but we have done nothing but search since then. We didn’t give up on you.”

He shakes his head. “She said five years had passed.”

“Dr. Kozak?”

“She looked after me.”

He draws his legs up to his chest and curls into a ball on his side. He wants to rest. But it’s not so simple. He sleeps better in the bed he knows, with her close by, with the morphine to ease any dreams he might have. Healing takes a lot of energy, especially coming back from the dead so many times. Yusuf does not leave well enough alone. He reaches out to place a palm on his calf, earning another swift kick. 

“Nicky-”

“Do you have any morphine?”

Yusuf doesn’t move his hand. “Are you in pain?”

“I need it.”

There is hesitation, but Yusuf stands up and nudges the food and water closer to him. “I will check with Andy, my heart. Is there anything else you need?”

“Stop acting like you care for me.”

There is no response to that, only the silence when he is once again left to his lonesome. He has seldom been alone since the labs, and it’s strange to be trapped in isolation once more, especially in the clutches of the people who made him this way. He doesn’t know if Kozak is alright, where they’ve taken him, or how long they intend to hold him for- perhaps indefinitely. Yusuf seems bent on it, and certain that he will be able to forgive their callous abandonment when he was afraid and unsure what would happen to him. Such betrayals are not easily forgiven.

He does not eat, and instead sleeps as best he can while he waits for someone to come back. It winds up being Sebastien, first. Sebastien drinks while he sits with him, but does not speak, because he knows that he was the first traitor. It’s his fault any of them got caught up at Merrick in the beginning. So they watch each other for a while, until Sebastien once again comes close. He does not resist when his throat is seized tight. No. He sinks to his knees and locks their eyes as his pulse flutters and his lips go blue. 

It’s so strange. 

He goes until Sebastien collapses, but not until he dies. If he killed him when there was so little fight, or even attempt at it, it would be a hollow victory that feels much more like taking advantage of this trust misplaced in his hands. So he releases him, and then waits for his windpipe to heal and his eyes to reopen. 

“What’s different now?” Sebastien croaks, rubbing his neck and backing away. “You killed me last night.”

There is no answer which may suffice. So he does not speak, content instead to wait for Sebastien to retreat once more to his chair and his flask. Sebastien is not only a traitor, he is weak, constantly burying any emotion in liquor when he has had so little time on Earth to truly experience pain in the first place. He did not suffer the way the others have. Nile understands that, at least. 

“I’m sure the others said something, Joe especially, but we did come for you, Nicky. We searched for you constantly. And we- I’m sorry that we didn’t get to you sooner. Clearly, you were hurt badly. I accept my role in this and I want you to know, truly, how sorry I am for putting you through this. You didn’t deserve it.”

He simply fakes a growl. 

“Nicky, talk to me. Please. Tell me you’re angry, or that you’re in pain, or that you want to leave, just- just say something.”

Part of him wants to stay silent, just out of spite. But in the time he’s spent away, he has become too accustomed to his lack of words, and there is a part of him that misses talking. He chooses to stay away from the English, so wrought as it is with memories of her. He switches to Italian for his words to Sebastien. Let him translate, let him struggle. The exact phrase is lost in his brain, but the words are natural, and he hears his own voice shaping around Yusuf’s name. And, carefully, he tells them of the posed photos that he knows they all took. 

“We never did that,” Sebastien says, but it means nothing when he has been a liar for so long. “I don’t know where those pictures came from, but we did not take them. We had no idea.”

Yusuf returns with a syringe. Before a word passes his lips, he offers his free arm and watches, waiting for the warmth. The freedom of it. The relaxation. Yusuf is careful as he searches for the vein, and at ease with the way he depresses the plunger. Heat. Love. Comfort. With a sigh, he relaxes back into the bed. 

“Did you get a lot of morphine?”

“After the videos,” he admits. “And if she needed samples. It helped.”

Sebastien says something that he doesn’t understand, and he rides out the morphine’s high alone. 

-

With the morphine, it’s easier. He sleeps on and off, drifting in and out, on a lovely soft haze as Yusuf returns to give him the drug. When he gets sober, he’s mean. He knows it to be so. They keep giving it to him just so he stops spitting his anger at them and trying to kill them, something very much like the doses in the lab to keep him calm and at ease. At least it’s familiar. Sometimes, they offer him food. If he’s drugged enough he’ll accept it, or at least let whoever comes in push it into his mouth and he eats it since it’s there. 

Yusuf stays close to him, trusting that it’s safe enough. Naive. Foolish. But he doesn’t hurt him, because it is always Yusuf who gives him his morphine, and him who will carefully uncuff him long enough to allow for a warm shower that keeps him clean, and avoid getting bedsores. They were unpleasant enough in the labs, he does not want them here, where things are not sterile and clean.

Although he is angry, he bides his time in complacency until he can find out if she’s alive, and then an opportunity to get out of here once they trust him to let him free. The drugs don’t hurt either. He can tolerate a lot with their use, including Nile sitting with him and telling him the same three stories of who he was before, over and over like it matters at all. She says he asked her about her nightmares. He made them all dinner. He protected her from this or that. But that’s not who he is anymore. 

He doesn’t know which one of them makes this choice for him. Most likely, it was Andromache or Yusuf, maybe the both of them in tandem, but he learns of it when it’s time for his morning dosage, and the needle that Yusuf brings him is only half full. 

“Where is the rest?”

“This is all you’re getting, my love.”

Of course, he allows the drug to be injected into his arm, but afterwards, he pulls at his cuffed wrist to try and get a little closer. “No, I need more than that. You know I need more. Give me the rest.” 

“This is to help you. Maybe once you’re sober-”

“What? Once I’m sober, I’ll suddenly forgive your betrayal? I’ll suddenly be a fool who believes you love me once more? I don’t want that. Give me the rest.”

Yusuf shakes his head and wipes down the needle with alcohol before returning it to its safe position on the dresser across the room. “We’re trying to help you.”

“I don’t want your help.”

He places a couple water bottles within reach on the nightstand, and a little plastic stack of saltines. That part is familiar. It means they’re done. Yusuf even gets a trash can and places it just close enough to grab if it is needed. No. They intend to force him through withdrawal. Desperate, he yanks at his restraints so hard the metal cuts into his wrist.

“Do not do this to me, please. Do you not love me, Yusuf? If you love me you will not do it. If you love me, if you ever loved me, you will give me what I need.”

“This is what you need. It’s going to be alright. Do you want me to stay with you?”

He mocks biting him, and so Yusuf leaves him to the last edges of his morphine, to suffer on his own through what will undoubtedly be more than unpleasant. He’s endured withdrawal before, from opium, back in Beijing so long ago it’s hard to remember. Yusuf and Andromache made that choice for him then as well. It had hurt and he may have died, he struggles to remember.

Within an hour or two, he’s craving more. The effects have worn off, and no one comes to give him a fresh needle. He waits, at first, just in case. No one comes. He screams that he needs help, he needs more, as his head starts to ache. That part he remembers from being weaned off that drug that hurt. He still went through withdrawals for it. Then comes the shaking. And the nausea. He keeps yelling, screaming at the top of his lungs, but no one comes. Not even to check on him. 

After the first round of being sick, leaning over the edge of being sick to empty his stomach, he changes tactics. “Yusuf! Yusuf, help me! Cuore, please! Please, this is torture! It hurts!” He tells himself that it is just to use the love that Yusuf still has against him, the least he deserves for the betrayal, but he finds a real tone of pleading threaded into his voice. “Help me! Yusuf, please! I’ll do anything!”

If Yusuf does show up, it is during a fit of unconsciousness, and they don’t get to look into each other’s eyes, nor is he able to beg for more morphine. The withdrawal does hurt, he is not lying about that. Every moment of it. It feels like days before he sees someone else’s face, when Andromache comes to change out his trash bin and blot his feverish skin with a damp towel.

“Where is Yusuf?”

She uncaps a water bottle and hands it to him. “He left after he gave you your last dose. Couldn’t listen to you like that. None of us really can. You know we don’t like seeing you in pain, right?”

“Then why torture me?”

“It’s not torture.” He makes a dismissive sound. “I’m serious. Nicky, you can’t just be high all the time. It’s not healthy. And it’s another thing that they did to me.”

“Whose fault is it that they were able?”

Finally, she leans away, and has the decency to look contrite. “It was ours. I’m sorry we didn’t find you sooner, we all are. And maybe, eventually, you’ll believe us. And I know, I know that this is another thing you don’t get a choice in, but it’s going to get better. You can’t like being numb like that all the time.”

“It is easier that way.”

Andromache looks like she has more to say, but instead leaves him behind with a clean sick bin, more water and crackers, and some facsimile of an apology. He calls names at her retreating back until his voice goes hoarse. Words she would normally kick him in the balls for- had certainly done so to Booker before he learned. Curses upon the old wound of Quynh buried in the ocean. Every awful thing he can think of, he screams, until he tires himself out with chattering teeth and falls back into a fitful sleep.

-

After that, they check on him when he’s asleep. Or at least he assumes. His trash can is changed, his water replaced, his crackers sometimes moved around. It feels like forever before he wakes up feeling somewhat better, and Yusuf comes to uncuff him and take him to shower off the mess of the sickness while someone changes his sheets. He knows he should not do this. But he is free, and stronger than he has been since he was first taken away from these traitors, and Yusuf’s pocket knife is an obvious bump in the pocket of his sweatpants. 

There is a second where he almost doesn’t do it. 

Then he grabs it, opens the blade, and has it against Yusuf’s throat, so similar to a death banished deep enough in his memory to be little more than a faint nagging voice. Yusuf looks at him. Takes his wrist in a light grip. 

“Nicolo, please don’t.”

He slits his throat, just as he did Sebastien’s, and watches Yusuf collapse on the floor, clutching the wound and falling still rather quickly as he bleeds out. There’s a lot of it. His warm eyes slowly dim, until they turn to glass looking up at the ceiling, and this is what finally causes something to break. 

Killing him sets something off. Yes, he has killed him in history, and Yusuf him- including at the labs- but this particular murder has not happened since before they first laid their bed rolls on the ground side by side to sleep through the night. Now, staring at Yusuf’s body, his blood soaking into the carpet, it makes his chest ache. He tosses aside the knife, drops to his knees, and cradles Yusuf’s face. This hurts him. He holds him tight. Clings to him. And when Yusuf gasps back to life, reorienting himself, he reaches for Nicolo’s face like it is instinct. It was, before everything.

Nicolo lets him. 

“Nicky?” Yusuf asks softly.

“I am here.”

Yusuf smiles and stays on the floor. They touch, they breathe, and Nicolo doesn’t know what to do with this anymore. It occurs to him that this was taken with the pain and the morphine and the memories that are finally beginning to become truly painful as they were at the time. The torture- that is what it was- was wrong. He was wrong. He is broken. For the first time in forever, he begins to cry. 

It is a quiet cry at first. Then he begins to desperately sob, until Yusuf sits up and holds him close, pressing Nicolo’s face into his shoulder. He comforts him, although he has just been killed, murmuring kind reassurances into the top of Nicolo’s head. He is too kind.

“I’m sorry.”

Yusuf shakes his head. “No. No apologies, amore mio. You were tortured, brainwashed, taken from us. You’re healing.”

“I hurt you.”

“It’s not the first time, and I have hurt you as well. Just relax, my heart. We have time for you to heal.”

Nicolo worries they will not forgive him for the things he has said and done, and already he can feel an itch under his skin saying that he should not be so close to Yusuf any longer. His mind is still most of the way convinced of the traitorous nature of Yusuf and the others, even as he clutches Yusuf’s shirt, and it will not be easy to make that go away, if he even can. When he pulls back, he is allowed to go. 

“Let me get you clean clothes. Booker and Nile will help change your sheets.”

“I do not know if my mind is ready to forgive you,” he blurts out.

Yusuf smiles sadly. “We have time. And besides that, we have leads on Dr. Kozak.”

Her name makes Nicolo’s heart beat faster. “Are you intending to give me back to her?”

His memories of her are still messy. She was the one who inflicted the pain, but also made it all go away, and looked after him. It was torture. But it was not, in some way, and this is where his mind gets confused and he decides he must focus on his shower instead. Whatever happened, it is over, and he has the opportunity to get better, if it is possible for him.

When he showers on his own, entirely sober and aware of the voices of the others talking to Yusuf as they clean up, Nicolo allows himself the faintest spark of fondness. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @transnicolo
> 
> Note- This is not a full resolution to the story. While Nicky did have a major breakthrough, this does not mean everything is fine, he is fully recovered, and/or that the others have forgiven his actions.


End file.
